The dangers of repressive/authoritarian government are often couched in terms of the dangers posed by malevolence & "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely". But the dangers of repression associated with mere incompetence are of equal if not greater importance (cont).
Human beings are biased, hubristic, and highly prone to errors of judgment - even the "experts". Human beings systematically overestimate their ability to accurately diagnose problems and effectuate solutions. For this reason, "top down" governance holds many dangers.
One of the biggest dangers of repressive government is simply that it forces the incompetence and errors of judgment of those in power onto others, rendering them powerless to resist it; and thwarts the capacity for alternative distributed, bottom up solutions to emerge.
The modern world was built through bottom up forces. Evolution is a bottom up process, and it has worked wonders in the natural world. Free countries with individual rights & free market are systems that are - more than anything - defined by their bottom up characteristics.
Everyone makes errors. Everyone is biased. But in a free system different people will hold different opinions and pursue different paths, and through some combination of randomness and openness, some systems of thought, ideas, and actions will prove more effective than others.
Those superior solutions are selected by market forces and in the free market of ideas in much the same way natural selection selects for random mutations that facilitate superior adaptation and survival in one's host environment.
In short, bottom up systems allow human societies to overcome the limitations of our own inherent incompetence, by allowing for a greater diversity of ideas and experimentation. Repressive government inevitably leads to entrenched incompetence & forced conformity to bad ideas.
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